An Englishman's Guide to Infidelity

Chapter 1: The anniversary

It was a summer Saturday, Thea's day, when she would absent herself from the house while I ran William and Zita from one sporting or artistic activity to another, using the wait times to park the car and jog around a convenient field. The family reformed late in the afternoon on the back lawn, me in my running gear making mocktails on the garden bench, and Zita climbing over Thea and sniffing her neck and wrists, guessing the names of the perfumes she'd sampled at the shopping mall in the New Town. The baby sitter was booked for seven, and I had already called my shop assistant three times to make sure that all was well. All fine, she said, not bad for a Saturday. I pushed aside the little niggle of anxiety; I wasn’t looking forward to letting her go.

Thea looked lovely, lounging in the deckchair in a white summer dress against her tanned skin, sipping a green drink piled high with orange fruit, a woman of thirty eight at the peak of her dark mature beauty. She didn’t look like any of the university lecturers I’d been taught by. She didn't look like a criminal for that matter.

I’d booked the restaurant and I had a small piece of expensive jewelry secreted in my linen suit.

We fed the children at the big table in the kitchen, the afternoon breeze bringing the scent of roses from the tiny walled garden that Thea had claimed as her territory. A little plaque on the doorway said ‘No children past this point’. At six the neighbour’s daughter arrived to take over William and Zita, and we retreated to the bedroom.

I never tired of watching Thea getting ready for a night out: The expensive unguents and delicate implements of beautification, dressing and undressing as she approached – by some logic I didn’t understand – the final choice of outfit; trying on heels and swirling her hips in front of the mirror. And finally the laying out of jewelry, matching the pieces with clothes, bag, shoes, make-up, mood, occasion. But tonight was somehow different. She seemed unusually animated and nervous. I showered, lounged on the bed in a robe and watched her begin the ritual at the dressing table, but she said, Get dressed and come back later. I don’t want you watching me. I tried a clumsy manoeuvre, sidling up to her and kneading her shoulders, but she stiffened, raised her palms and said, Just go.

Downstairs the children were playing with the babysitter’s body piercings. She had taken her nose stud out and William was prodding it with a spoon. Zita was trying to get one of the teenager’s earrings into her unpierced lobe. Can we all wash our hands after this game please? I said. I hung around in the garden reading the paper until it was ten minutes before the arrival of the taxi, and then went upstairs. I knocked gently on the bedroom door. Not long, Jack.

After a minute I knocked again and pushed the door. Thea did a swirl for me and I was transfixed by the dress - the muted sheen of the fabric, the deep harmony of magenta and charcoal grey, the way it hugged her body like a slinky second skin, accentuating the lines of her shoulders and legs. I must have had my mouth open because she said, No need to goggle. What do you think, silver jewelry with it? I recovered myself: Silver of course, something discreet. Thea said, Right answer, clever boy, and kissed me deeply.

While she chose the jewelry I saw the glossy carrier bag. As the owner of a select bookshop in the most upmarket shopping street of a wealthy cathedral town, I know that you don’t buy a Jules Hector in British Home Stores. I’ll just check whether the taxi’s here, I said. I went into the vestibule and stabbed my phone to log on to our credit card account – no sign of a thousand pound purchase. Thea caught me up: Stop fiddling with that phone. This is our anniversary dinner. In fact I want you to leave it at home. I made a face but she gently took the phone from me with one hand and slid the other inside my jacket, caressing my chest: Just leave it.

We’d chosen The Secret Cottage for most of our special occasions – anniversaries, birthdays, family celebrations – and I’d asked Maxwell to give us the table in the little nook that looked out into the cobbled lane behind the cathedral. Here you were out of earshot of the noisy groups of twenty and thirty year olds who seemed to have unlimited funds to spend on eighty quid champagne and mounds of oysters flown in from Scotland. But the hum reminded you that you were still on the fringe of the social ritual of public eating. The nook had a rich velvet curtain, and Maxwell drew it half way across. We often ate with friends, and so the evening started with the small talk that couples dining alone use to fill the transition from ordinary life to special occasion – nice tableware, Maxwell’s looking well, red or white, what’s the fish of the day, you smell nice, gin and tonic to start.

The Cottage was busier than usual – there was a conference at the university and some of the delegates had found the town’s worst kept secret – and Maxwell apologized that our orders might be a little slower than usual. In the meantime he had a waitress top up our G&T’s so that after half an hour we were both affected by a woozy recklessness. I think that if the entrée hadn’t arrived at that point we would have closed off the velvet curtain and made love on the table, but we settled down to eat moist scallops glistening against flat pink shells.

We finished a bottle of Chablis before the main course and I was trying to stop my head from lolling. Thea looked determined to stay upright, but I knew that she was as far gone as me. I should say that we have only ever been moderate drinkers; we were in territory we’d seldom visited before. Thea’s pink lamb and my veal arrived, along with a leathery red wine. We swapped portions, feeding one another from our forks. Then Thea said, Well, aren’t you going to ask me?

Ask you what?

How I paid for the dress. I saw you looking at the bag and I know what you were doing on the phone.

You saved up, I suppose.

But my salary pays the housekeeping. You know I don’t really have any left over.

I was feeling a little nauseous and I tried to drown the sensation with a big quaff of red wine.

I suppose it’s not really my business, I said feebly.

Don’t sodding well beat around the bush, Thea said, smiling.

So tell me.

Hold onto your seat.

We both swigged more wine. Thea looked directly into my eyes: I found a wallet on the ground in the university. There were nine hundred pounds in it. I kept the money and threw the wallet in the pond.

We said nothing. The meat was cooling on our plates. Thea calmly picked up her knife and fork and began eating again, and I copied her. I felt giddy and disoriented, sweaty under my linen suit. I looked at Thea and watched her jaws working. You look like a hamster, I said, unaccountably, and kept chewing. You look like a guinea pig, she said, and by some hidden chemistry that fuelled our fifteen years of love and intimacy, we both had an urge to giggle. Maxwell popped his head round the velvet curtain and stared at each of us curiously: Something I’m missing mes enfants? We stared back and shook our heads, our mouths ready to burst. As Maxwell withdrew we both managed to swallow our food before breaking down into tipsy laughter. When we’d recovered our composure I looked at Thea, who had taken out a compact mirror and was dabbing at her panda eyes.

I don’t know why I did it, Jack. I was just overcome by this feeling to do something reckless, like skiing off a cliff.

Did anyone see you?

No, there wasn’t a soul around. It was on a path between the sports centre and the river.

Whose wallet was it?

Sir Percy Bushmore’s.

The Chancellor?

Yes, he was at the campus a couple of days ago for the opening of the new gym.

I thought for a moment. He’s worth a fortune, I said, God, did I actually say that?

Yes, you did, and you can’t take it back. By the way, have you forgotten something?

I fumbled in my suit and gave her the little package. She opened the plush lined jewelry box containing the antique ring: It’s lovely. It’s what – Edwardian? See how the stone is set in those tiny gold claws. Thank you.

We shared a dessert like conspirators. Thea’s eyes were glistening, and I felt a wave of desire the force of which I hadn’t experienced for a long time. We got the bill and asked Maxwell to get a taxi, quickly. At the house I rushed the baby sitter next door, giving her too many crisp bills – No change, don’t worry. When I got back Thea was slipping out of the dress. I took it from her, held it to my face, breathed in her perfume, and folded it gently on a chair. We made love with the passion of twenty year olds and the knowledge of forty year olds. Later we woke up and, surprising ourselves, did it again.

I opened my eyes to find the bed empty, but I could hear Thea and the children clattering breakfast dishes downstairs. There was no sign of the dress. I felt thick-mouthed and sour-hearted. I stepped into the shower and turned the water on hot, gradually adding cold until I was being drilled by icy needles, and my head began to clear.

The daily routine of breakfasts and tennis packing was under way, with Thea capably directing operations. It was drizzling outside, and the focus was on rain gear.

Morning, I said.

Dad looks sick, Mum, Zita said. Thea wouldn’t look at me, just kept being capable, although I could see she was pale.

What time’s your first lecture, love? No answer.

Why’s Mum’s taking us to tennis today? William said.

Is she?

I went upstairs and hung around the bedroom window. I watched Thea bundle the children into the car and drive away. I logged on to the big computer in my study at the back of the house and checked the electronic calendar we shared: 11am First year Philosophy Summer School - Ethics Lecture. I sighed a very big sigh, and looked at my watch: Just time to stroll down to the shop and buy a coffee and a croissant on the way.

Walking through our pretty cathedral town never failed to brighten me up. We lived in a three-storey house, parts of which were centuries old, a quarter of a mile from the cathedral and the knot of cobbled lanes surrounding it. My morning walking commute took me along ancient ivy-clad walls, and dinky half-timbered shops selling quills and parchment, rugged woolen yarns, Italian hiking shoes, antique maps, and all the bits and pieces of expensive frippery fancied by tourists visiting a town where Sir Edward someone or other was hanged during the English Revolution, and where any building worth its heritage contains a good many Roman bricks hauled from the nearby ruins before Chaucer was born.

Around the time of the magenta dress, however, my mood would droop by the time I turned the corner near the market square and caught view of Books by Birdswell.

It’s time I explained a bit about myself. First of all I suppose you could say that I was lucky. I grew up in the cathedral town in the house where I used to live with Thea and the children. There was an imposing brass plate on the front wall announcing our house's name 'The Windings'. The family joke was whether ‘Wind’ rhymed with ‘find’ or – the source of lots of flatulence humour – ‘sinned’.

My father was a doctor and so I grew up with quite normal expectations that I’d go to university and be another doctor or a dentist or a vet, and marry somebody like my mother, who never worked a day in her life. Things went only slightly to plan. I became a chemical engineer down in London and not a medical person. I met Thea in my mid-twenties, we married, and we settled down in a rented flat in Kilburn, saving for a deposit on a house – she tutoring in philosophy at one of the better ex-Polys, and me working in a lab designing the next generation of baby wipes. By the time the children arrived we were still in the same flat, wondering when we might ever scrape the last few thousand pounds together.

The change came in the form of a head on crash with an articulated lorry during a night of freezing sleet just near Reading, five years ago. By the time they’d cut my parents out of the Jaguar, both had expired and I was an orphan with an inheritance. Thea and I moved into The Windings. We converted the consulting rooms into a guest flat and still had acres of space for our small family. Thea got some casual work at the local university and I gave up baby wipes while I pondered what to do with the pile of cash and shares I now owned. Thus, Books by Birdswell, named for the little river that threads its way through our town, a shop with a steady tourist clientele, a nice agency arrangement with the cathedral gift shop, and a rock solid annual textbook contract with the university. And that’s where my luck began to run out; having bought BBB I soon learned that I didn’t have a clue how to run a business. The previous owner was incommunicado, no doubt laughing kitbags in a farmhouse in Tuscany, so I couldn't ask him why the takings were thirty percent less than they were under his management. Then a couple of years later a London book chain unexpectedly signed up with the university and I lost the core of my business . Anyway, that’s enough history for now.

My part-time shop assistant was due in at eleven to help for a few hours with the lunchtime rush, such as it was, but I phoned her and said she wasn’t needed. There was silence at her end, and then she said, I depend on this job. I can’t rely on it if you keep putting me off. I need to find something else.

I have to let you go, I said, almost choking not on what I was doing, but on the trite phrase.

That’s it then.

I suppose so.

***

At midday Mr. Firth the verger came in carrying a suitcase and looking sheepish. I kept an eye on the midday ‘rush’ – a few loiterers getting a free read and soiling the book covers with their sandwichy fingers – and greeted him. I stared at the new shiny plastic badge on his lapel. Next to a discrete cross it said ‘M. Firth Business Development Office’. I knew why he was there.

I’m so sorry Jack. The Dean had a management consultant go over the Cathedral’s finances, and they’ve recommended we go with another firm. He discretely placed the suitcase by the counter. No hurry to return the suitcase. All the remaining stock is in there.

Which left me with Major Clive Handwell.

I unpacked the verger’s books, shelved them, sold a self-help book to a lunchtime loiterer (he’d left a greasy one on the shelf and paid for a clean one) and then sat down to have a good think about my retired Major.

The mood at dinner that night was dire. The children were silent and sullen, and willingly scooted to their rooms when they had gobbled their dessert. Thea and I filled the dishwasher in silence.

How was your day? I said at last.

How was yours?

So so. The usual.

When I dropped William and Zita off at school this morning, the bursar asked me to come to his office.

I fiddled with a tea towel. The bursar? Oh, the silly old sod. Was that about the cheque for the fees? I thought I’d phoned him. I picked up an old cheque book for some account I don’t use any more and it bounced of course. I said I’d send him a replacement.

Thea looked at me unsteadily: Jack. What’s happened? Are we in trouble? It's the shop, isn't it?

***

You learn to become invisible after a few months in prison. I fell in with a group of other misfits, among whom the common factor was that we were educated to a level that would be measured in the stratospheric in comparison with the rest of our fellows. The four of us ate together, exercised together and always tried to appear as no more than four smudges on the wall. My three friends were all in for shortish stretches for financial fraud of one variety or another. Me, well I was in a different league altogether; on remand for a start, with only the vaguest idea of my trial date. At least I wasn't in the remand wing; you heard horrible stories from there - men trying to hang themselves, vicious fights with sharpened toothbrush handles. When I asked why I'd been put in with the sentenced prisoners they said, because with a posh accent like that in the remand wing you'd get your brains bashed in, especially after what you've done. We had ten university degrees among us - I say had, because one day my cellmate didn't wake up, died of a brain aneurysm during the night, and we were down to seven degrees and three smudges and me wondering who I'd be sharing the open toilet with.

Here I am then, stuck for presumably quite a few years in prison in a forlorn field in the Midlands, miles from the pretty cathedral town where Thea and I broke the mold cast for us by family, school, university, and the law of the land. Here I am, forty, getting portly on jailhouse stodge, just starting an online bachelor of something or other that I don't need except as an antidote to brain rot, and becoming even more vastly overqualified for my prison job as mopper of floors and duster of handrails.

Chapter 2: In fine fettle

The detective who interviewed me got it all wrong about Major Handwell. I was outraged to hear that I had ‘groomed’ the old chap. Disgusting word, made me sound like a gerontophile. Anyway, I’ll tell it the way it was and you’ll see that my relationship with the major was based on mutual respect.

The morning after Thea suggested we might be in trouble – and I had reassured her that all was well – I put the ‘Back at 10.30’ sign on the shop door and locked up. The Major’s house was fifteen minutes’ drive from the Old Town in a small estate of substantial mock Tudor houses built in the fifties, graced with net curtains, shiny black German cars, mature trees and professionally tended gardens. I knocked several times and listened for the shuffle of slippers and walking stick. The solid timber door slowly opened on its massive wrought iron hinges, and the cadaverous military ancient stood peering from the hallway.

Dear Francis, do come in.

Good morning Uncle Clive. Everything well?

The Major shot out an arm and a skeletal wrist poked out from the crisply pressed shirt. I shook his hand gently, fearful that I would break a tiny decalcified birdlike bone and cause a fatal haemorrhage. He insisted on making tea and I waited in the parlour for twenty minutes listening to the faint clinking and jets of water. I’d spent quite some time sitting in this room studying the massive tapestry covered armchairs, the sideboard as big as a frigate, the ornate marble mantelpiece that supported a French clock like the Albert Hall laid sideways on a gun carriage.

The Francis and Uncle Clive business had started six months before, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The parlour door slowly opened, nudged by a long carpet-slippered foot which was followed by a cavalry twill trouser leg, the stick, and then the Major himself maneuvering a little trolley laid out with crockery that bore a regimental crest. I put the proffered cup on a side table, took an envelope from my jacket pocket and placed it – as always – on the tea tray. The Major made a slight snorting noise and waved his fingers at the envelope as if it were a trivial but bothersome matter that was beneath our attention.

And what news of your family? Major Handwell asked with the customary conspiratorial inflection. My part in this, I’d learned, was to respond with some similarly collusive gesture, and I’d developed a little repertoire of winks and smirks